Quotes about taboos

The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.

— Freda Adler

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

— William Hazlitt

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

— Michael Malone

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

— Henry Miller

To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

— Robert Louis Stevenson